[ilds] Selected Fictions

[Marc Piel]

Thanks Bruce for your remarks.

 From the very first reading of the AQ I 
understood that most of the characters were either 
taken from or were hybrids of people that LD 
knew... for me it was all to true and possible to 
heva been totally invented. Also nearly all the 
personalities had their true self and their 
selected self.

All these years later I think that is true of most 
people, and some even hjave selves posed onto them 
by their family, their way of making a living, or 
the context of their lives which often they can do 
nothing about. I don't think at all that that 
makes us all schizophrenic. "Selected" can be by 
us, for us and in spite of us. The whole structure 
of the AQ; the same story seen from the different 
points of view of the actors is temoignage of 
this. It is also LD's genious. Have you ever 
played the game where everyone is situated around 
in a circle and one person whispers a phrase to 
the next, who in turn repeats it to the next and 
so on... the phrase ends up completely transformed....

Have you ever taken a look at the "Enneargram" ?

Salutations,
Marc

Bruce Redwine a écrit :
> Marc,
> 
> Yes.  "Lives" or personalities as "selected fictions" would seem to be 
> one of Durrell's pet ideas.  In the poem "Alexandria," we have the line, 
> "As for me I now move / Through many negatives to what I am." 
>  "Negatives" is ambiguous, it could refer to negation or to photography, 
> but I usually take it to mean the latter, a photographic image. 
>  (Durrell liked photographs, how they momentarily captured a bit of 
> reality.  Cf. the scene in /Balthazar/ developed around a photograph 
> taken in Mnemjian's barber shop or the scene in /Justine/ where Nessim 
> appears behind a frosted glass door:  "He developed like a print in a 
> photographer's developing bowl.")  I'm sure more examples of this idea, 
> other variants, can be dug up throughout Durrell's oeuvre.  The idea of 
> the "unstable ego" gets developed in chapter three of Durrell's /A Key 
> to Modern Poetry/ (1952), which begins by quoting D. H. Lawrence on the 
> passing of the "old stable ego."  Once Durrell establishes the basic 
> human personality as "unstable," i.e., fluid or unknowable, it's not a 
> big leap to believing in "selected fictions" or "multiple selves."  For 
> me, being a rather down-to-earth guy, this has never made much sense, 
> and I doubt if many psychiatrists would go along with Durrell's 
> analysis.  Isn't having "multiple personalities" part of the definition 
> of schizophrenia?  On the other hand, maybe Durrell was a little crazy, 
> that being part of his genius.  Look at the end of /Monsieur/ and all 
> those multiple levels of narration, all those "begats," all that 
> fragmentation -- the novel seems to be having a mental breakdown.  Old 
> Durrell, bless his heart, seems to be going off the deep end.  And I 
> think he sometimes did.
> 
> 
> Best,
> 
> Bruce
> 
> 
> On Oct 2, 2009, at 3:54 PM, Marc Piel wrote:
> 
>> Thank you Bruce for situating the citation. The
>> accompagning paragraphe explicites the meaning:
>>
>> "Our view of reality is conditioned by our
>> position in space and time--- not by our
>> personalities as we like to think. Thus every
>> interpretation of reality is based upon a unique
>> position. Two paces east or west and the whole
>> picture is changed.' Something of this order.....
>> And as for human characters, whether real or
>> invented, there are no such animals. Each psyche
>> is really an anthill of opposing pre-dispositions.
>> Personality as something with fixed attributes is
>> an illusion ----but a necesary illusion if we are
>> in love! (last five words in italics).
>>
>> Bruce, you must surely have a numeric version of
>> all this..... I am sure this idea was also said
>> elsewhere!
>> Best regards,
>> Marc
>>
>>
>>
>> Bruce Redwine a écrit :
>>> Marc,
>>>
>>> Good point.  "'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere, 'lives based upon
>>> selected fictions'" /(Balthazar,/ New York 1986, p. 14).  And Durrell
>>> and his alter ego weren't lying.
>>>
>>> Bruce
>>>
>>>
>>> On Oct 1, 2009, at 3:03 PM, Marc Piel wrote:
>>>
>>>> Surrely he summed it all up himself with the words
>>>> "we each live our selected fictions".
>>>> Marc (or was it "we all live our selected fictions"
>>>>
>